The Engine

SUSAN HILLER AT THE TATE BRITAIN, March 2011 Susan Hiller (born Florida, USA, 1940) is an American artist who relocated to London some thirty years ago after a brief flirtation with academia, leaving a PhD thesis on anthropology unfinished. Hiller possibly found academe too constricting, too rational for the purposes of creativity. Hiller’s work is concerned with the unconscious which was purportedly discovered by Sigmund Freud, but also seeks to relate the unconscious to art & creativity, religion, magic, the paranormal and other modes of modern discourse that perhaps exists now in an era of uncertainty when religious precepts are being overturned yet not quite convincingly replaced by the next thing. In this sense her work hardly seems more informed than does the poetry of W.B.Yeats, informed as it was by all sorts of Occult experiments, alternate, esoteric wisdom and experiments.  Items such as planchettes, ouija boards all referenced by Hiller in the various installati...

NORTHERN STAR by STEWART PARKER at the Finsborough theatre, London directed by Caitlin McLeod with Jonathan Harden, Clare McMahon, Michael Byers, Sean Pol McGreevy, Adam Best, Helen Belbin, Gemma-Leah Devereux, Mark Edel-Hunt, Anthony Delaney The Finsborough theatre is an intimate venue meaning a miniature theatre set above a wine bar and restaurant in the Kensington & Chelsea area of London. The theatre specialises in re-discovering neglected masterpieces, this is the first revival of this play in ten years, so it comes as no surprise that a late Stewart Parker play is being re-examined here in the context of Ireland's recent bankruptcy. For we can also suppose that the default will trigger another great exodus of Irish people (but where?). The play deals with the life and times of Henry Joy McCracken (1767-1798), sometime member of the United Irishmen, revolutionist, nationalist in an era before Nationalism. Firstly its obvious that the minimal resources of the theatr...

ROMEO AND JULIET AT THE ASHCROFT THEATRE, FAIRFIELD HALL, CROYDON   This production of Romeo and Juliet at the Ashcroft Theatre, Croydon, attempted to contextualise Shakespeare's great romantic tragedy within relevant, contemporary themes of knife crime and gang violence in south London. Using pop music and back projected newspaper excerpts, the director attempted to bring the play up to date, to emphasize its completely constant relevance. It largely followed in the footsteps of Baz Luhrmann's film version of 1996 but also stopped short of the baroque excesses and occasional silliness of that production. The director seemed to fail to pursue the contemporary themes throughout the play, leaving them to dangle in space at the very beginning. After this initially successful sequence the production reverted to an old-fashioned interpretation of Romeo and Juliet, thus making the bare, sparse mise en scene and contemporary dress a bit purposeless. Unlike Double Falsehood the po...